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Does Wikipedia Suck on Science Stories?
An anonymous reader writes "An editor from Wired writes on his blog that Wikipedia sucks for science stories — not because they are inaccurate, but because of what he calls the 'tragedy of the uncommon': Too many experts writing about subjects in ways that no non-expert can understand. Would this be the dumbing-down of Wikipedia — or would it be a better resource for everyone?"
Quality of knowledge is important. Readability is second.
Because it is wiki, any initial story that is written in too esoteric terms can be further edited by people less in the know and more able to eloquently explain. So by the very nature of the media is better than either peer-reviewed or popular scientific literature in terms of how well the content gets distributed. How well the inaccuracies get caught is a whole different ball game.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In a well-written Wikipedia article, the big words are wikilinked. When one doesn't understand something, one clicks the links for further understanding.
This has always been the promise of hypertext, but it is only fully realized in Wikipedia. I couldn't agree less with the premise that Wikipedia is unaccessible.
Additionally, as the article notes, there is also Simple English Wikipedia.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/
It doesn't have 1.7 million articles, but... of course not. There aren't that many concepts in "simple English."
Dick Feynman's position, for example, is that you can't learn modern physics without the math. Analogies can only go so far, and there's a reason a person requires a PhD to understand some subjects.
Is wikipedia really only source for the lay person? I never thought so.
rather than dumbing down articles, accept that:-
1. There are going to be things beyond your ability to understand.
2. Certain things require learning and research to understand
Wikipedia is just a reference point. If you don't understand the reference, follow it up !! Research !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
You have to use the "big words" [re: ideas, terms, vocabulary beyond a 6th grade level] to be practical. I mean try explaining something like the makeup of the ATP cycle using words an 11 year old would know. Try explaining calculus with rudimentary algebra [e.g. basic linear systems], etc.
I don't think it would be useful to severely dumb down all of the articles. Maybe they just need more "see also" or reading guides?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Unfortunately, you usually can't "dumb-down" a subject without misleading people. You could, e.g., equate chemical bonding with atoms "holding hands" and such, but that doesn't do anyone any good. The advanced reader gets no useful information, and the naive ones don't get anything meaningful that they can build on, either.
People get turned on to science when they realize they understand something for the first time; I don't think that reducing everything to cartoon characters quite does the trick for anybody.
I'm an idiot about music theory, so I figured Wikipedia would be a good place to start. But there are so many show-offs trying to one-up each other by trying to sound overly academic, that it took me hours, and way to much cross-referencing, to get a good handle on the subject.
It's an ENCYCLOPEDIA, it's meant to get you started; if you want detailed knowledge, you should go to a detailed source. I'm shocked and insulted that the first 3 replies to your post said, more or less, "if you need something simpler, buy a kids book". What ever happened to "all the knowledge of the world"? Whatever happend to "an educational resource"? And they've been doubly stupid since it's not like Wikipedia is running out of room; we can have the extra-technical information if someone wants it--on a seperate page, or futher down on the page--but the top of the article should describe, in a simple way, what it's about, in a way that anyone who's graduated from elementary school, with no expert knowledge on the subject, should be able to understand it.
Readability first. Details second.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Oh my god. You know Wikipedia must be bad if an editor from Wired, of all the trashy pop-sci magazines, is complaining. What's next? An editor from People Magazine complaining Wikipedia sucks for objective information about celebrities?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
if thy want dumbed down science stories, I suggest they check out this site.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Dumb Wired writers, expecting instant gratification. Wired used to have reporters who actually went out and covered real stuff. Then they laid off most of the reporters and kept the "editors". Now they're just wannabe pundits. Saves on travel expenses.
That Tired writer isn't coming across as someone who spent long days digging something out of library stacks or public records. Or travelling around asking people questions to find out what really happened, like a real reporter. This is a lightweight. If you want a children's encyclopedia, you can still get World Book.
Wikipedia has many problems, of course. Most of the good articles were in the first 500,000 created. What's coming in now is mostly junk - "State Route 92", "Star Wars Furry Adventure #6659", and similar crap. Wikia offers some hope for an amusing reason. Wikia took over Wookiepedia, the repository of Star Wars fancruft, which generates most of Wikia's traffic. They're monetizing the fan base. Over time, maybe all the popular culture stuff can be moved to Wikia. That would be a win.
Once again, Wikipedia comes through.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
The word encyclopedia comes from the Classical Greek "(munged)" (pronounced "enkyklia paideia"), literally, a "[well-]rounded education," meaning "a general knowledge." Though the notion of a compendium of knowledge dates back thousands of years, the term was first used in 1541 in the title of a book by Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius, Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia (Basel, 1541).
It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific.
When I was about 8 my family bought a complete set of World Book encyclopedias. And sure it didn't cover everything, and nothing after 1978, it did offer good basic information that an 8-year old could read and a 50-year old could appreciate.
Fast forward a few decades. The other day I went to wikipedia looking for some basic information on my new dental crown. While I did (eventually) find the information I was looking for, it's full of sentiences like:
"The alloy used for PFMs is of a different variety for those used for FGCs. "
"Because the sprue former stuck out a little bit from the investment material, there is a communication between the outside and the investment pattern."
"When using a shoulder preparation, the dentist is urged to add a bevel; the shoulder-bevel margin serves to effectively decrease the tooth-to-restoration distance upon final cementation of the restoration."
I'm not a moron, I can do the additional research and figure out what all of the words mean in this context, but damn, I wish I had my old World Book encyclopedias.
I have a BS in Mathematics, and quite frankly most of the time I find Wikipedia useless as a reference for Mathematics. This is because I don't understand/remember the terminology they're using! Let me repeat that: I have a BS in Math, and Wikipedia's math terminology is beyond me. (I should point out that I got my degree over a dozen years ago, though.)
As an example, I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on Group Theory. The first paragraph is comprehensible, but virtually information-free. The second paragraph uses technical terms that I would have to look up for them to mean enough to be informative.
From there on out it looks to me as if everything would only mean anything at all to someone who already has a very good handle on just what Group Theory is.
Now, if you skip down to the definition of a group, that's what I remember from my graduate Algebra course and it is more or less readable. Why the hell couldn't that be up top? Moreover, why couldn't the main article for Group Theory essentially be a non-technical rendition of that definition, along with some non-technical examples of where Group Theory is used?
There could be a second Wikipidia article, maybe "Group Theory, Advanced" that reads more like the current main article does.
I've seen some people pointing out that Wikipedia would have to offer some misinformation to be more readable, and that's sufficient reason to not be readable. That's horse crap. Suppose it turns out physics is too complicated for humans to understand accurately without two decades of study. Should we then not teach anyone newtonian gravity, because to avoid misinformation everyone needs to get two or three PhDs to understand it completely?
Read Feynmann's Lectures on Physics. He states up front that he's going to lie to the students a little, so he can present to them some useful tools for solving problems before he complicates it. His audience is physics students at MIT. If Feynmann can simplify things so MIT physics students can get started, Wikipedia can simplify things for their audience of random idiots on the web.
Remember: what's the purpose of Wikipedia? Is it a simple repository of articles intending to include every esoteric detail known to the sub-sub-subfield? No, it's an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are not a compilation of research papers, they're a compilation of summaries. Summaries, by definition, do not include everything. The quality and completeness of knowledge are worthless if they can't be spread to others. Science does not advance because of discoveries, science advances because of the spread of those discoveries.
Wikipedia can provide the best of both worlds. It itself is a compilation of summaries, providing basic understanding, but to those who want or need more, there are links at the bottom to more detailed explanations, more thorough information. A Wikipedia with every detail possible would turn away people who want to understand something new simply because of the ridiculous principle that if one is to learn something, one must (futilely) attempt to learn everything at once. Imagine, for example, if someone went to Wikipedia to learn about the immune system, and came upon this:[taken from my bio class notes]
Yeah, it's informative. Great. But who wants to try to understand that if all they want is a basic understanding? Having an article written this way will turn away people who would otherwise learn something. That defeats the purpose of the encyclopedia. That defeats the purpose of Wikipedia.
Leave your elitist "learn everything or you're inadequate" shit at your graduate research lab. Not everyone is willing, or has the time, to wade through what is otherwise white noise to get to the relevant info. Forcing mundane details down the throats of interested parties is doing a disservice to the spread of science.
I recently did some research on Wikipedia on the Roman Empire. I ran into repeated use of the term "don the purple" when describing the accession of Roman emperors. Yet I NEVER found a description of what "the purple" really meant. Was it the crown? Was it a robe? Was it just an abstract term used with no direct object being referenced?
I asked about it on a talk page, and instead of somebody actually telling me, they said it should be obvious, and complained that I was nitpicking.
I know that when I edit articles in subjects I am knowledgeable about, I try to REMOVE 'jargon' when at all possible. If the jargon is an essential part of the article, then I make sure to explain the meaning in layman's terms, or link the jargon-esque word to an article that explains what it means.
Encyclopedias are *NOT* research journals. They should explain the subject in terms that someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the subject can understand. Yes, 'dumbing down' may create times when an article is technically inaccurate, but such inaccuracies in the name of simplicity should be noted, with a link to a more technically accurate, if less readable, explanation.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
That's the same fallacy that the FOSS zealots are prone to. They say, if you want a feature, or don't like a bug, write it or fix it yourself. Well, not everybody has the knowledge or time to do that.
Same goes for Wikipedia articles. How can you fix an overly esoteric article if you don't understand the subject in the first place (and that's why you came to Wikipedia)? Answer: you can't. Even those who can may not have the time, and those who do have time may not have the ability to write about it coherently.
So for those who write FOSS or Wikipedia articles: cool. Awesome. You contribute to the community. But, please, don't blame inadequacies on those of us who don't/can't contribute. That's weak.
But if I want to edit Residue class-wise affine groups, I have no fucking clue where to begin in order to explain the concept in layman's terms.
That doesn't make sense. Some math subjects are esoteric. There is no way one can explain it simply without first explaining five years' worth of math theory. No way. If you want a simplistic article on an esoteric subject, you are asking the article to be 500 pages long. That would simply be redundant.
Just think how utterly absurd that is: engaging in a research project simply to understand an encyclopedia article? It defeats the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia in the first place.
Again, I completely disagree. I find this exact process to be the best learning experience I have had. I have edited hundreds of Wikipedia articles about things I did not know much about. I start reading the article, and as I come across things that don't make sense to my level of understanding, I change them. Sometimes this requires that I do a good deal of research to be able to make that edit. So it may take me a whole hour to edit a 2-page article. This is an awesome way to learn. By the time I am done, I have a tremendous understanding of the subject... and I have helped the next person get a good understanding much more quickly. Everybody wins.
Try it sometime. It may take you an hour or two (hint: most Wikipedia articles have an "External links" section that is tremendously helpful), but you will find that you have expanded your understanding enormously. Isn't that the highest goal of an encyclopedia?